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Thursday, September 19, 2013

First Page - Gape by Aiden Truss

When Rose woke up in her favourite shop doorway, she
was resigned to yet another day of hunger, struggle and abuse. This was life on
the streets after all.

What she wasn’t prepared for, was a visit from a demon,
an invitation back to his temporally insubstantial sanctuary, and forced to
take sides in a battle involving most of the denizens of hell. Oh, and a boat
trip down the river Thames.

After a disappointing start to the day, things were
about to get a bit more interesting…

GAPE

Aiden Truss

Foreword:

Separated by those vast and normally
insuperable gulfs of space, time and imagination, two beings sit at the
crossroads of their lives - one human, and one something more than human. Both
feel the weight of their existence and a solitude born of their introspection
and contemplation. Both are equally lost and shackled by their seeming
impotence in the face of the storm blowing around them.

Of all the different types of crises we
face, it is the internal, personalised ones which hit hardest, cut the deepest
and yet teach us the most valuable lessons. In that sense, it makes not one jot
of difference that one of our protagonists is a female human and the other a
male demon. As we shall find, near omnipotence does not denote omniscience and
incapacity need not mean weakness.

Life cuts through complications – it’s
just that we seldom step back and allow it to take its course. We always assume
that there is a point, that there is something more to it all than a series of
contiguous moments, a chain of causes and effects – that there must be a cosmic
narrative and a divine plan. Sometimes it’s handy to know what’s around the
next bend in the road, but still, we must negotiate that bend and the change of
direction that it brings. Whether you’re a milkman or a 7th level
demon, you still have to get your head around your day job and the challenges
and satisfaction that it may or may not bring. In Paradise Lost, that shrewd
observer of the eternal struggle, John Milton, wrote:

The
mind is its own place, and in itself,

Can
make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

It was poetic license – Satan never
really had to jump to such conclusions, but you get the gist don’t you. It’s
where you’re at in your head that defines the world around you. For this
reason, our tale is set in recognizable worlds, with familiar terms of
reference. The everyday world of humanity is set in the unremarkable London
suburb of Bromley. I would have used Croydon for a setting, but this might have
placed us nearer to purgatory in terms of imaginative leaps. (Papers recently
unearthed during Dan Brown’s search through Vatican records reveal that the
medieval Catholic Church considered calling the transitory state between Heaven
and Hell ‘Croydon’, but were persuaded differently by its connotations of
helplessness and despair; at least in purgatory there’s the hope of something
better to come!).

The universe, or cosmos as your author
has chosen to describe it (paints a bigger picture than just ‘universe’ don’t
you think?), is full of different levels of life and evolution. Creatures
living in dimensions unknown to traditional science co-exist in areas of space
occupied by more conventional life-forms. Every so often, these planes
intersect and cross over. Hence we have unexplained sightings, strange craters
in the wilderness, ghosts and silly old women making a fair living at
pretending to be psychics. None of which are the least bit extraordinary if you
have a tiny inkling of the true nature of the...